


we will be here.

by Quecksilver_Eyes



Series: We're not meant to be alone [13]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: F/F, M/M, Temporary Character Death, hello lykon lives no i dont take criticism, in which there are hugs and love and lykon wakes to a changed world, lykon and language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:48:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26565367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quecksilver_Eyes/pseuds/Quecksilver_Eyes
Summary: When he comes back to life heaving, clutching his stomach, Andromache and Quynh are gone. The grass is no longer grass, feels cold and hard and uncaring against the ache settled deep in his bones. There’s stone sloped towards him, the constellations of Quynh and Andromache’s childhoods crumbling from them. He remembers painting them, their hands messy with pigment, Quynh’s laughter bright in her throat, Andromache’s handprints all over her. Lykon had laughed with them, Quynh’s hands all over him, in red and white stains all across his skin.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Lykon & Quynh | Noriko, Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: We're not meant to be alone [13]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1906879
Comments: 22
Kudos: 174





	we will be here.

Lykon is aching. There’s blood stuck to his hands and dripping from his lips; the slice of steel through his stomach, Quynh’s hands soft and frenzied – Andromache’s eyes bright as the skies. The grass underneath him is soft and wet and as young as this spring and Lykon – Lykon is dying, again.

Death has always been sitting on his lips and carved into his bones, like the fall and rise of his chest; his blood smeared across his skin and across battlefields with the swing of a spear, the splice of an axe. Lykon has grown up entangled with his breath leaving him and his limbs collapsing underneath him, in tandem with Quynh and Andromache and their laughter, gathered around a fire, a tangle of limbs.

This is different.

Lykon is dying, again.

When he comes back to life heaving, clutching his stomach, Andromache and Quynh are gone. The grass is no longer grass, feels cold and hard and uncaring against the ache settled deep in his bones. There’s stone sloped towards him, the constellations of Quynh and Andromache’s childhoods crumbling from them. He remembers painting them, their hands messy with pigment, Quynh’s laughter bright in her throat, Andromache’s handprints all over her. Lykon had laughed with them, Quynh’s hands all over him, in red and white stains all across his skin.

At night, Andromache had told the stories of her people as Quynh translated. Andromache’s language is lodged into stories and songs. Once, she had tried to disentangle it to teach him – the sounds of it, the feeling of it deep in his throat. Once, Andromache had tried her best to translate her tongue for him and had lost all her grasp on it; heaving.

So Lykon lay, his head in Andromache’s lap as Quynh braided her hair and translated for him, a soft mumble of voices against the flickering fire. There was a song for each star, and Lykon had looked up into their fabricated skies and followed Andromache’s song.

Now, the stars are crumbling from their firmament, and Lykon lies on the cold stone floor, his stomach still bloodied, iron still heavy on his lips. There’s an ache in his guts and a tremble in his hands, and the crumbled paint lies smeared across his skin in bright gashes.

Lykon clutches his stomach and waits for it to heal, his heart high in his throat.

That night, he dreams of four new ones; entangled and loved, their voices draped around languages he does not recognise.

The world smells differently. It feels hot and crisp on his skin, like something wrapped tightly around his lungs. His hands are trembling and the world sounds differently, too. Lykon’s voice lies tangled in his throat; a useless thing. There’s a woman standing in front of him in clothes Lykon doesn’t recognise, her tongue wrapped around a language he’s never known, and the world has changed around him.

_How old am I? How long did I lie, gashed open and dead under a sky that has long since shifted?_

_Did you bury me amongst your stars?_

“I don’t understand you”, he says, and the woman tilts her head.

In his dreams, he dies of love. In his dreams, he watches a man kill another, watches all the blood and all the hatred seep into the hot sand until neither one of them has the strength to drive splinters through one another anymore. In his dreams, he hangs by a thread over a bottle. In his dreams, he wakes before dawn to run until his muscles burn. In his dreams he dies and dies and dies with each of these new, unclouded lives. He doesn’t recognise the world they have carved their space into.

She doesn’t try speaking to him again. Instead, she comes to the cave each evening with food and drink and a smile. Lykon takes half of the food and leaves her the rest. She smiles at him.

There’s a routine, there, in between drawing his childhood for her and her drawings of this changed world. He teaches her the tangles of his tongue as she teaches him the movement of hers, tied to her hands and her paint. She is the youngest of three, loud mouthed and big hearted, her mother’s laughter wrapped in her father’s poetry, and Lykon tells her of his mother and her weaving.

“I have lost my friends”, he says one day, as soon as he knows the words for it, leaning against the crumbling stone, “a very long time ago. I do not know where to start looking.”

She furrows her brows. “Let me help.”

In the end, it takes ten years, five languages, his dreams untangled in a journal, and several gofundme’s his friend sets up with a fierce determination. In the end, they search half the world; changed and aching and with the taste of iron on his lips. His friend lies wrapped in blankets and laugh lines draped across his shoulder, her breath an even, soft thing. He kisses her forehead and thinks of Quynh, wraps his arms around her and thinks of Andromache.

“You have such good genes”, she says one day, poking his cheek as he shaves and he waves the knife in her direction. “Not a single wrinkle on you. Rude.”

Lykon aches.

In the end, standing in front of a house tucked into a street corner in Malta feels like his guts spilling from him all over again. The walls are white, bright things, and the door looks new. The garden is blooming and there are cats by his feet, purring softly.

His friend has her hands on his shoulders and he rests his hand against the door. He knocks, and a man opens, with steady hands and eyes like glass, like his dreams carved into reality. Lykon’s life drops to the floor in front of him.

“Hello”, he says softly, in the way Italian lies heavy in his throat. “I am looking for my friends.”

The man sighs, and leans against the doorframe. “I don’t think you will find them here”, he says. “I’m sorry.”

Lykon grabs the doorframe and all his life and the laughter in Andromache’s throat. “Please”, he says softly, his friend’s hands heavy on his shoulders. “I have spent years looking for them.”

“Look”, the man rubs his temples. “I can guarantee you that your friends are not here. Perhaps you have the wrong house.”

Lykon shakes his head. “I am looking for Andromache.” He swallows the iron in his mouth. “I am looking for Quynh.”

Andromache’s hands still feel the same, even as her eyes have aged from a starless sky to a summer storm, Quynh’s smile is still the same even as she smells of salt water, pressed against him. For the first time in a decade, Lykon speaks his own tongue into their hair, into their hands on his cheeks and spread across his back.

His hands are trembling. Quynh’s voice is wavering. Andromache’s eyes are as old as time. And still, they lie tangled on this sofa, Quynh’s laughter settled into Lykon’s bones, Andromache’s touch warm on his skin. Their languages spill from them, a tangle stretched threefold between their mouths, and Lykon drops kisses on their shoulders, their cheeks, their hands.

“We will be here when all the stars have burned out”, he says, an oath as old as Andromache’s bones, and Andromache presses her nose into his hair. “We will be here until time ends, we will be here until the world dies. We will outlast kingdoms and survive a million deaths, still.”

“All of us”, says Quynh. There are four new ones, with untrembling hands and unshaken voices gathered around them, and Lykon smiles at them.

“Hello“, he says. “I have dreamt of you.“


End file.
